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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Are we just making assumptions? I've built up a few different mapping / GIS related projects over my career, and the satellite imagery can change on a whim, sometimes its spot on, other times its dated, the zoom can also affect it as well, you zoom in and its from years back, you zoom out slightly, and its from last week.

Has Apple made any remark about this to confirm? It would not surprise me if Apple just isn't even aware of this changing on their app. (For those unaware, they source their map data from various sources / vendors, as does Microsoft's Bing Maps.)

Edit:

The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic. I also looked into when Apple Maps last updated, they stopped showing any live data in the region back in 2023 after October 7th, even in Israel. The post is highly misleading to spark outrage.

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> It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple simply isn’t aware that this has changed in its app.

Yet they were pretty quick to change Lake Ontario to Lake America. OTOH, if Apple has no idea what its own app is serving, that shows poor state of their monitoring system, right?

This is satellite imagery. Its common for this to be outdated af, especially outside of EU/US. It costs A LOT to process these compared to just switching a single label in a database.

If there's anything to worry about it's that MS will stop providing aerial imagery to https://www.hotosm.org/ as it seems they slowly give up on Bing maps altogether. Cool they atl donated em so far.

The deletion of place names, roads, business labels, etc throughout the southern half of Lebanon suggests that there's basically no way ignorance is involved.

You can 100% delete those without needing to update map data, my statement still stands, there's plenty of mainstream news sources that confirm that Apple has not updated their mapping data for the region since at least 2023. Google updated theirs in 2026 and one news org immediately compared Google Maps in the region vs Apple Maps in the region:

https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-09-29/gaza-bef...

Why would Apple make a remark about this? You can literally go look for yourself and see they've done this. As another commenter pointed out, they almost immediately removed the names of ethnically cleansed towns from Southern Lebanon as Israel wiped them off the map.

> The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic.

Says who?

> Why would Apple make a remark about this? You can literally go look for yourself and see they've done this. As another commenter pointed out, they almost immediately removed the names of ethnically cleansed towns from Southern Lebanon as Israel wiped them off the map.

They have not updated the satelite images since 2023, this is a known documented thing, news sites have literally compared Apple Maps to Google Maps when they finally updated their images for the region in 2026. Apple can remove roads if it knows they're no longer around, it doesn't mean they have to update satellite images, which has been the case.

> Says who?

Literally browse posts by that account, it doesn't take very long to see antisemitism throughout the account. ...Why are you touchy about that? The tweet is literally rage bait.

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